Defiant Joy: Unity in the Lord - Darren Whitehead

This Sunday, guest Pastor, Darren Whitehead, continued our Summer
sermon series, Defiant Joy: A Study Through Philippians, and
focused in on Paul’s call to unity in the church. These verses
reveal a conflict between two women in the church at Philippi,
but Paul pleads with them to have the same mind in the Lord. This
points us to the truth that the beauty of unity is rooted in
God’s ability to transform our desires towards His. Community is
not an absence of conflict, but the presence of God’s reconciling
Spirit. However, there are cultural challenges that try to stand
in the way unity. The church today faces political, racial,
generational, and economic divides, but in the Lord there can be
a unity in the body that crosses all of these lines. As
believers, our loyalty to Jesus should be greater than our
loyalty to any political party, we should identify first and
foremost as a follower of Jesus, we should honor the generation
before us and not look down on the generation after but build
them up, and we should extend care within the church regardless
of financial standing. These counter-cultural postures foster
unity in the church and creates access to new authority. Pastor
Darren referenced Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit fell on
followers of Jesus, and before the Spirit came, it is said that
the believers were ‘all of one accord in one place.’ It was after
unity was already happening that God poured out His Spirit, and
the early church was born. Unity is so important to God that He
commands a blessing where His people live in unity with one
another. We each have the ability to disrupt unity, but we also
have the ability to repair it, and this is God's call to us
today.